One of These Things First
A Memoir
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From New York Times–bestselling author Steven Gaines comes a wry and touching memoir of his trials as a gay teen at the famed Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.
One of These Things First is a poignant reminiscence of a fifteen-year-old gay Jewish boy’s unexpected trajectory from a life behind a rack of dresses in his grandmother’s Brooklyn bra-and-girdle store to Manhattan’s infamous Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, whose alumni includes writers, poets, and madmen, as well as Marilyn Monroe and bestselling author Steven Gaines.
With a gimlet eye and a true gift for storytelling, Gaines captures his childhood shtetl in Brooklyn, and all its drama and secrets, like an Edward Hopper tableau: his philandering grandfather with his fleet of Cadillacs and Corvettes; a giant, empty movie theater, his portal to the outside world; a shirtless teenage boy pushing a lawnmower; and a pair of tormenting bullies whose taunts drive Gaines to a suicide attempt.
Gaines also takes the reader behind the walls of Payne Whitney—the “Harvard of psychiatric clinics,” as Time magazine called it—populated by a captivating group of neurasthenics who affect his life in unexpected ways. The cast of characters includes a famous Broadway producer who becomes his unlikely mentor; an elegant woman who claims to be the ex-mistress of newly elected president John F. Kennedy; a snooty, suicidal architect; and a seductive young contessa. At the center of the story is a brilliant young psychiatrist who promises to cure a young boy of his homosexuality and give him the normalcy he so longs for.
For readers who love stories of self-transformation, One of These Things First is a fascinating memoir in the vain of Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors. With its novelistic texture and unflagging narrative, this book is destined to become one of the great, indelible works of the memoir genre.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gaines (Philistines at the Hedgerow) looks back at the central issue of his Jewish childhood in Brooklyn, and the unnerving disorder of feeling different, as he works in his grandmother's ladies' clothing store. The author, who was 15 in the early 1960s, places readers right in his Borough Park neighborhood. The family thinks he's going crazy, possibly due to his unmasculine work, while he tries to explain the sexual chaos in his head. His father takes the youth to a doctor who suggests treatment in a mental hospital, landing Gaines at exclusive Payne Whitney. At the hospital, his doctor approaches his case in the conventional manner to cure his homosexuality, while Gaines witnesses the priceless and zany antics of a supporting cast of oddballs neighbors and fellow patients worthy of a Marx Brothers madcap romp. By turns comic, honest, and riveting, Gaines tells a story of a well-meaning shrink and his troubled young charge locked in a war of wills to ease "the trauma of homosexuality" and restore his humanity in a conservative world.
Customer Reviews
Loved this book!
A very entertaining little memoir, funny and heartbreaking at once. I read it in one day and will be thinking about it for many more days to come...